Pastor White labors up the stairs with a plate of ham and crackers and sits on the little brass bed breathing hard. He picks up Soldier 404, the one with the rifle held over his head, and says he’s not supposed to tell Zeno this, but he heard that on the day Zeno’s Papa died, he sent four Japs to hell all by himself.
At the bottom of the stairwell someone says, “Guadalcanal, now, that’s where?” and someone else says, “It’s all the same to me,” and snowflakes float past the bedroom window. For a split second Zeno’s mother sails down from the sky in a golden boat and while everyone watches, stupefied, he and Athena climb aboard and she sails them to the Celestial City, where a turquoise sea breaks against black cliffs and lemons, warm with sunlight, hang from every tree.
Then he’s back on the brass bed and Pastor White is frog-walking Soldier 404 around the bedspread, reeking of hair tonic, and Papa is never coming back.
“Bona fide honest-to-God hero,” the pastor says. “What your daddy was.”
* * *
Later Zeno sneaks down the staircase with the plate and slips out the back door. Athena limps out of the junipers, stiff with cold, and he feeds her the ham and crackers and she gives him a look of pure gratitude.
The snow falls in big conglomerated flakes. A voice inside his head whispers, You are alone and it’s probably your fault, and the daylight wanes. In something like a trance he leaves Mrs. Boydstun’s yard and walks Mission Street to the intersection with Lake Street and clambers over the plowed berm and punches through the drifts, snow gushing into his funeral shoes, until he reaches the lake’s edge.
It’s the tail end of March and out in the center of the lake, a half mile away, the first dark patches of melt have begun to show. The ponderosas along the shore to his left form a vast, flickering wall.
As Zeno steps onto the ice, the snowpack gets thinner, freeze-dried and blown flat by wind. With each step away from shore, his sense of the great dark basin of water beneath his shoes deepens. Thirty paces, forty. When he turns, he cannot see the mills or town or even the trees along the shore. His own tracks are being erased by wind and snow; he is suspended in a universe of white.
Six paces farther. Seven eight stop.
Nothingness in every direction: an all-white jigsaw puzzle with the pieces thrown into the air. He feels himself teetering at the edge of something. Behind is Lakeport: the drafty schoolhouse, the slushy streets, the library, Mrs. Boydstun with her kerosene breath and her ceramic children. Back there he is Olivepicker, Sheep Shagger, Zero: an undersized orphan with foreigner’s blood and a weirdo name. Ahead is what?
An almost subsonic crack, muffled by the snow, rifles out into the white. Flickering behind the flakes does he see the royal house of the Phaeacians? The bronze walls and silver pillars, the vineyards and pear orchards and springs? He tries to get his eyes to work, but somehow their seeing-power has been reversed; it is as though they look inward, into a white, swirling cavity inside his head. Whatever is asked of us, said the president’s wife, I am sure we can accomplish it. But what is he being asked and how is he supposed to accomplish it without Papa?
Just a little farther. He slides one shoe another half pace forward and a second crack croaks through the lake ice, seeming to begin in the center of the lake and pass directly between his legs before shooting toward town. Then he feels a tug at the back of his trousers, as though he has reached the end of a tether and now a cord is pulling him home, and he turns and Athena has a hold of his belt in her teeth.
Only now does fear fill his body, a thousand snakes slithering beneath his skin. He stumbles, holds his breath, tries to make himself as light as possible, as the collie leads him, track by track, back across the ice to town. He reaches shore, staggers through the drifts, and crosses Lake Street. Heartbeats gallop through his ears. He shivers at the end of the lane and Athena licks his hand and inside the lit windows of Mrs. Boydstun’s house adults stand in the living room, their mouths moving like the mouths of nutcracker dolls.
* * *
Teenagers from church shovel the walk. The butcher gives them ends and bones for free. The Cunningham sisters move him to the Greek comedies, aiming for lighter fare, a playwright called Aristophanes who, they say, invented some of the best worlds of all. They read The Clouds, then Assemblywomen, then The Birds, about two old guys, sick of earthly corruption, who go to live with the birds in a city in the sky only to find that their troubles follow them there, and Athena drowses in front of the dictionary stand. In the evenings Mrs. Boydstun drinks Old Forester and chain-smokes Camels and they play cribbage, working the pegs around the board. Zeno sits upright with his cards neatly fanned in one hand, thinking, I’m still in this world, but there’s another one, right out there.